Being snowed in and not having cable, I just watched our Commander in Chief give a pretty poor presidential news briefing today. After his pathetic speech, he took on some questions from the so-called liberal media. During these questions, Bush looked down at the screen on his podium quite often, just as he did when he was making his speech. Heck, he even looked like he was pausing to read things on the screen, and appeared to craft answers around what he was reading at the time. This begs the question, were people in Bush's administration prompting him and helping him to answer the press's questions?
It truly appeared, to me at least, that Bush couldn't handle the press's questions on his own, without getting help from that monitor screen. More below the flip.
Very often during answering the questions, Bush would say some fluffy filler kind of sentences like "Our troops need to succeed in the mission" and other generic patriotic mumbo jumbo. But doing this he'd look at that screen on the podium, sometimes for several seconds, and then suddenly shift gears into a sentence focused specifically on that question. He'd glance down again, change into another focused sentence. It really seemed like he had some people backstage helping him out.
He also tended not to look at that screen until some time after the questions too, letting the people backstage have some time to prepare a response for him. Ie, he would immediately respond to the questions with the kind of patriotic and hand-wavy political fluff alluded to earlier, until he glanced down. It really truly did look like he couldn't answer the questions on his own, and needed pointers, facts, and phrases from his backstage minions to craft a response.
Even if he's getting help, is this bad thing? Have other presidents or politicians ever been caught getting help answering questions?
Are there youtube clips of the speech and Q&A today? It would be cool if other people who saw the speech or saw some of the clips commented as well.